The Road to HighEdWeb 2016

Welcome to what I hope will be a continuing series in LINK focused on our road to HighEdWeb 2016. My name is @marleysmom, and I’ll be your tour guide (and conference chair/leader) this year.

I’m incredibly proud to have been given the responsibility of chairing this year’s conference. I’m excited about the 2016 Annual Conference for lots of reasons:

We’ll be in the South. That means the weather won’t be cold and the food will be heavenly. We southerners – even though some of us are really hothouse flowers – Love Life. We love to take care of visitors and show them a good time.

We’ll be in Memphis. There is so much to do in this city that you’ll need an extra week to explore. Stay tuned to this channel, and we’ll tell you all about it.

We have a great team on board. HighEdWeb — the whole Association, including the Annual Conference — is run by volunteers each year. When you come to Memphis, be sure to thank them for their hard work.

We’ve already put tons of work into planning and are sitting on our hands so we don’t accidentally let y’all know stuff too much ahead of time. Trust us, we can’t wait to tell you, and it will be worth the wait.

Finally, HighEdWeb is the conference BY and FOR higher ed web professionals. You all set the tone for the event; you tell us what’s important with your emails and tweets and submissions, and we respond. If that’s not the most awesome thing, I don’t know what is.

As you sit there, hopefully getting more excited about the possibilities this coming October 16-19 in Memphis, I ask you to mark your calendars right now. Registration will start in April, but you can submit your presentation proposal right now. If your proposal is accepted, you get a discounted conference registration.

About the authorTonya Oaks Smith

Tonya Oaks Smith has spent most of her adult life smoothing frayed edges, herding wet and hungry cats, breaking down silos and perfecting the #facepalm – all while dancing backwards and in heels with a big smile on her face. A former reporter who sold her soul and then redeemed it by moving to communication for a public university, Smith is a fan of the words “y’all” and “malheureusement” – not necessarily in that order, and prefers the em dash to commas. She’s currently the executive director of university communications at Louisiana Tech University.